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Thursday, 2 March 2017

TUNNEL VISION.

The Israel Comptroller published
his report on the leadership conduct of the military, political and
intelligence echelon before and during the 2014 war imposed on Israel by Hamas
in the Gaza Strip.

Prominent in his report were the
issues surrounding the Hamas tunnel threat. It accused the political and
security establishment of gross failures though stating that none required
career-ending investigation.

The report was quickly followed
by the predictable but unseemly finger pointing as prominent people and
agencies jostled to absolve themselves of blame.

Sifting through the weeds it is
clear that the rivalry between the military intelligence and the Shin Bet
security apparatus, although both making great efforts to gather quality
information, did not present the severity of the developing tunnel threat to
the cabinet members in the national security committee. Neither were the
shortcomings and intelligence gaps in and between the two intelligence branches
about the situation in Gaza in general and the tunnel threat in particular
brought to the attention of the security cabinet. But neither did the cabinet
under the Prime Minister demand to know the significant dangers and size of the
tunnel threat.

Prestige and ego, it seems,
played a negative role in Israel’s security posture.

Clearly, the Hamas tunnel threat
continues today. Seventeen known tunnels remained intact after Operation
Protective Edge. Israeli military intelligence has no idea how many new ones
there are and in which direction they are running. Despite a huge investment of six hundred
million shekels the science and technology of tunnel detection and destruction
still lacks an optimal solution leaving the residents of the border communities
living in fear and uncertainty.

This leads us to another critical
question.

If the accurate locations of terror tunnels were detected would the
world tolerate a large scale military incursion into Gaza to search and destroy
them? Based on the massive condemnation that Israel receives from fraudulent
claims and specious allegations this is highly unlikely. This leaves Israel
with the limited choice of living with the unbearable anticipation of a sudden
terror attack or incurring international wrath by inflicting occasional
surgical air strikes which, according the military analysts, damage but not
destroy lengthy underground tunnels.

And what of Lebanon?

Northern residents of Israel are complaining
of suspicious sounds under the feet. The army came to investigate, didn’t find
anything and told the concerned citizens to relax. But the IDF knows from their
last incursion into southern Lebanon that Hezbollah has built an elaborate maze
of strategic terror tunnels that make Hamas’s underground excavations look like
rabbit warrens by comparison.

Can Israel unilaterally send
troops into Lebanon on a mission to search out and destroy tunnels for the
safety and security of its citizens? Would the international community tolerate
an invasion of another state’s sovereignty in the name of self-defense? Not likely.

Which brings us to Palestine.

Several Israeli military and security experts have written that Israel need
have no fear from a ‘demilitarized’
Palestine following the signing of a two-state deal. Can we believe
them?

We believed them prior to the fateful
Yom Kippur War when they told us that the Egyptians had no intention to attack
us. We nearly lost our country. We lost 2412 of our finest young men and
officers.

We believed them when they told
us it was best to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 and that UN forces would patrol
southern Lebanon and keep us safe. Since then we have been viciously rocketed
by Hezbollah who now have in excess of one hundred thousand sophisticated
rockets supplied by Iran aimed at our major cities.

We believed them when we withdrew
from the Gaza Strip in a vain search for peace.

We believed them as we responded
to the war that Hamas inflicted on us in 2104 but now discover that our vaunted
intelligence services failed us and our military withdrew leaving more than
half the terror tunnels untouched.

No. We have no faith in military ‘experts’
who are trying to assure is that it will be all right to withdraw to borders
that Abba Eban once described as “Auschwitz lines.”

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the
Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies.

He is the author of a new book ‘1917. From Palestine to
the Land of Israel.’